I left when Tolka Row made me an offer I couldn't refuse

MY SCHOOL DAYS: As soon as a Thespian life became a real  possibility, an eager Jim Bartley exited school stage left

Even the little school entrance looked like a prison cell door. It had a little window with iron bars on it surrounded by this gray forbidding wall. I was going into low babies in St Joseph's Convent - we knew it as Weaver's Square - in the Tenters in Dublin. At that stage we didn't have any Montessori to wean us into school, so all of a sudden we were just whipped into this place that looked every bit like a prison to me.

I remember when I got up to the class door with my mother and the teacher came out to bring me in, I put my two legs up against the sides of the doorway and screamed my head off - there was no way I was going in there. My mother said when she left me she passed an abattoir which was used by Donnelly's factory up the road and you used to hear the pigs squealing before they went in to be slaughtered - and she said she could hear my screams above them.

That was my first day and I realised then that I could be bribed. The only reason I went into the classroom was because the teacher, Miss Moriarty, held up a thrupenny bar of Cadbury's chocolate. It was then I realised I was a chocolate addict and then I was in the door.

There was touch of violence in the place and they weren't adverse to using the cane on little infants and you wouldn't have known half the time what it was for. There was one very severe looking lady with her bluey-grey hair and a blue overall coat and this awful looking flat stick that she used, so by the time I went to the Christian Brothers I was well used to the violence.

I went to primary and secondary in Coláiste Mhuire in Parnell Square. It was an all-Irish school. I went there because my father was a fierce Gaelgoir and he loved everything Irish. So I was sent to Parnell Square all the way from Drimnagh on the 23 bus. It was a typical Christian Brothers school. There were brothers and lay teachers and unfortunately I think the brothers were the more violent of the two. It's a terrible thing to have to say but the thing I remember most was the violence - they weren't adverse to slapping you across the face and using the famous leather - or leathar as we called them in Irish.

There were also good times. I enjoyed the football and the drama. We used to enter for the Irish language festival in the Gate Theatre at the time and that started my interest in drama. We used to do half-hour children's plays; Bothán na Smuigléirí was one of them and that was in the primary. I think I must have been about nine or 10 when I knew I wanted to become an actor.

Then in the secondary we had Tomás Mac Anna from the Abbey Theatre coming in to direct the school pageant and he suggested I should take up acting. I started acting on stage in Dublin at the same time as being in school. One of the first things I was in was the Remarkable Mr Pennypacker at the Olympia Theatre in 1958. I think I was on about £10 for it, which was a lot in 1958. Gay Byrne and Larry Gogan were in it too. Larry Gogan was the juvenile lead and Gay Byrne was the eldest son of an illegitimate family. I was one of the children of the legitimate family.

One of the very first jobs I had when I was at school was really the test of my attitude towards authority. There used to be a cork in the old crown bottle tops and I was in charge of the conveyor belt to check that the cork was secure in the crown top. So I was day-dreaming one day and practising signing my autograph and all these crown tops flew by into boxes without any tops on them and there was about 250 boxes ruined. The boss came out and read the riot act to me. I was only 13 at the time and I just turned around and told him where to shove his machine and walked out the door and that was it.

I was studying for my Inter Cert at the time and I was on in the Olympia and I just barely passed my Inter because I spent a lot of time at rehearsals and the only reason I did pass was because we did it through Irish. I was very interested in English and literature, history and geography, but I knew the academic side wasn't for me at all.

I stayed on in school until I was offered Tolka Row in 1963. The brothers would have been very encouraging about it and at the end of the day they actually encouraged me to leave school. They had a meeting with my mother and father and Tomás Mac Anna and said okay. I had the offer of the television series and they said "lets get rid of him while we can" but they strongly recommended I do the Leaving at night in Emmet Road technical school. I managed about two weeks and that was it.